If you haven’t already tried out PowerPivot, or if you need a little help educating your IT department on SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, check out these two reports from leading research firm, Gartner, Inc. These important notes highlight the value of PowerPivot and how IT should prepare for and position PowerPivot. They also offer best practices based on real-world customer scenarios and feedback for building business intelligence (BI) and performance management architecture.

Read the full Gartner reports here:

What is SQL Server PowerPivot?

Q&A: What are Customer Experiences with SQL Server PowerPivot

BI is a top priority for our customers who are looking for solutions to bring better business insights to employees making decisions every day. PowerPivot introduces Microsoft’s unique ‘managed self-service’ approach that gives companies and IT departments the ability to enable and empower their business users to create reports and conduct their own analysis while still maintaining all the insight and oversight of IT.  It’s this focus on users that differentiates Microsoft BI. Microsoft has long been tracking on a vision of bringing BI to more users and PowerPivot is another step in this direction to making BI truly pervasive. 

Another recent note by Gartner’s John Hagerty (formerly AMR) titled: “Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel: Unleashing the Business User” discusses the critical need for companies to embrace the business user, enabling them to get important work done and freeing up IT for more strategic projects.

For more information, see our previous posts here and here. For a free trial, visit http://powerpivot.com/.

Microsoft has recently released a new Silverlight control called PivotViewer. This new control helps us to make better use of the growing amounts of information around us by visualizing thousands of things at once in a way that reveals the relationships which connect them. At the heart of the PivotViewer control are "Collections." They combine large groups of similar items, so we can begin viewing the relationships between individual pieces of information in a new way. By visualizing hidden patterns, PivotViewer enables users to discover and act on new insights.

The Business Intelligence engineering team have prototyped a new concept that couples the PivotViewer control with a utility that uses Reporting Services to automatically generate this type of collections. We showcased this concept at the BI conference in New Orleans with overwhelming support and interest from our community of BI enthusiasts and are making this demo available here to those that would like to evaluate it in their own sandbox environments. View the video here to find out more.

As you view and try this prototype, treat it like a "Concept Project". Although the Silverlight PivotViewer is now a final shipping product, the PivotViewer extension for SQL Server Reporting Services is just a preview, and isn’t a supported product or a feature of Microsoft Business Intelligence. As such, it may not work perfectly under all conditions. We look forward to your feedback and participation in this experiment and will continue working hard to bring cutting edge visualization technologies like PivotViewer to you as fast as possible. Enjoy!

Guest partner post by Shimon Shlevich, Product Manager at Panorama Software

As Microsoft PowerPivot is gaining more popularity and exposure, BI professionals ask more and more questions about PowerPivot’s role in the organization in trying to understand what value the new in-memory BI solution from Microsoft brings, along with the benefits and the limitations of it. Is PowerPivot going to replace SQL Server Analysis Services? If so, how soon? What should be done with the existing BI solution? Or maybe both can coexist and serve different needs?

In order to answer these questions and understand both short and long term impacts of the new products on your BI solution we need to understand what motivated Microsoft to release this new creature and where do they position it. Microsoft are trying to achieve two main goals – introduce a new in-memory engine for data processing and promote the self-service BI concept extending the usage of BI systems to a wider audience.

The new in-memory engine is called “Vertipaq”. Vertipaq is claimed to perform much better than classic SSAS engine doing the aggregations and calculations as well as temporary data storage in a computer’s RAM eliminating the slow disk lookup overhead. The first version of this engine is currently released as a part of both Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and the SQL Server 2008 R2 enabling SSAS to work either in classic or the new in-memory mode. The in-memory mode for SSAS is currently only available for PowerPivot created cubes and not for all your classic cubes, however, eventually the new engine will make it to a major SSAS release and will become the new default engine of the SSAS.

Meanwhile, classic SSAS is more functional than PowerPivot in terms of analytics and administration. SSAS has more semantics such as hierarchies, and more administration support such as robust data security functionality. SSAS is probably the richest multidimensional engine on the market today, scalable to support large data amounts and completely enterprise ready. The downside of these capabilities is that SSAS project requires design and planning of the BI solution, implementation, deployment, testing and additional phases. A team of BI developers, IT support, long development cycle and not that frequent updates result with a highly customized, less flexible solution which is good for years and relies on enterprise data which structure does not change that often.

Analysis Services is the corner stone of any corporate infrastructure and it enables users to analyze data that has already been pre-modeled for them by IT. So users can create standard reports, dashboards and KPI’s based on the data there, in a sense, answering ‘known’ questions. PowerPivot, on the other hand, enables users to connect to any data and instantly start modeling and analyzing it “on-the-fly” (without IT defining the cubes and modeling it in advance). PowerPivot essentially enables users to answer those ‘unknown’ questions that can often exist.

How often have you had data was missing from the cube? Or a business user come to ask for a missing metric and you postponed its creation for the next data warehouse update which was postponed and never actually happened? This is where we need self-service BI and this is where PowerPivot comes to help both the business user and the IT team. PowerPivot authoring environment is the same beloved Microsoft Office Excel that everybody has and knows how to use. The simplicity and the familiarity of this desktop tool eliminates the need for additional training and increases the adoption rate. Give them a tool they are not afraid to use and they’ll know how to work with the metrics. Business users are able to just go through any data on their flat spreadsheet and produce a cube from it in a pivot table with only a single mouse click. There are certain limitations there, but the value is still huge – self service BI with zero training required and remarkable engine performance providing instant business value.

That’s why we say SSAS answers your “known” questions and PowerPivot solves the “unknown” ones. Panorama NovaView 6.2 supports both systems and supplies our customers with the same interface and same tools for both SSAS and PowerPivot. NovaView’s unified security layer secures both data sources at the same time and with the same security definitions making administrators’ life easier and making PowerPivot ready for a large enterprise deployment. NovaView BI Server resides in the center of the BI solution and implements the business logic, additional data semantics, and security applied on both SSAS and PowerPivot. It also delivers the data insights over both data sources via the entire suite of NovaView front end tools such as Flash Analytics, Dashboard, Smart Report, Spotlight and more.

By adopting the Microsoft roadmap of self-service BI, Panorama offers intuitive and easy to learn tools which allow business users to connect to either SSAS or PowerPivot cube within seconds. Following the initial connection NovaView users can manipulate the data, build extra calculations, exceptions, charts, KPIs and more. Users can save their work and share it with colleagues by making it publically available, sending by email or via a SharePoint portal. Specifically for PowerPivot, Panorama’s data security layer and rich analytical and dashboarding abilities extend PowerPivot cubes and create an enterprise ready, self-service, in-memory driven BI solution.

Learn more about Panorama for PowerPivot >>

Microsoft announces new solutions and offerings to help customers and partners realize the benefits of cloud computing, including the Windows Azure Platform appliance.  Read the blog post by Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of Server and Tools.

Written by Eugene Saburi, Business Platform GM, Microsoft

At this year’s World Partner Conference (WPC) I’m leading a breakout session on how partners can achieve competitive advantage by investing in the Microsoft Application Platform. I’ll discuss how we enable partners to deliver amazing solutions based on our platform and how we continue to create new opportunities for our partners in areas like the cloud and business intelligence.

Topics for this session include:

1. Sharing our business priorities
2. Quantifying the opportunities for our customers
3. Showcasing successful partners

Additionally, you will have the opportunity to share your learning, experience and provide feedback to help us further innovate the platform for your needs.

I welcome your feedback on any topics or specific content you would like to hear from us at the event. You can find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/eugenhs or send feedback through our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/sqlserver.

Session details:

• Date: Monday, July 12th
• Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM ET
• Location: WCC-149AB
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Platform
• Speaker(s): Eugene Saburi

Details of this and other Application Platform sessions available here

SQL Server 2008 SP2 CTP contains all the cumulative updates for SQL Server 2008, and fixes to issues that have been reported through our customer feedback platforms.  These include supportability enhancements and issues that have been reported through Windows Error Reporting.

SP2 CTP applies to:
SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition
SQL Server 2008 Evaluation Edition
SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition
SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition
SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
SQL Server 2008 Workgroup Edition

SP2 is expected to release in CY 2010

Download SQL Server 2008 SP2 CTP

As was recently observed by web analytics and download feedback, there is a lot of interest in PowerPivot within the Healthcare industry.  A recent blog posting noted that healthcare was the top industry when viewing PowerPivot Interest by Industry.  One of the key reasons is that while healthcare systems have a lot of data (i.e. patient transactional data), it is often left to the analyst using Excel to understand the meaning behind all of this information.

How often are patients coming back?

A common question in hospital settings is that once a patient who has stayed at a hospital leaves (i.e. discharged from the hospital), how often are they coming back to the hospital (i.e. readmitted to the hospital).  This type of re-admission analysis is very important because it ultimately allows analysts to determine why patients are coming back to the hospital within a set number of days of being discharged.

Healthcare Readmission Analysis Example Scenario

Below is an example screenshot of obfuscated sample readmission data from a healthcare customer.  As you can see, there are some large disparities between department discharges (in blue) and the re-admission rates (in red).  For example, while the pulmonary department has relatively few discharge cases, they have the highest re-admission rate near 35%.  Meanwhile, internal medicine has the largest number of discharges, yet one of the lower readmission rates.

Why is this important?

There are many reasons why these disparities exist.  For example, pulmonary medicine will often see higher readmission rates because the complexities involved (e.g. asthma, COPD, cystic fibrosis, etc.) while internal medicine will see lower re-admission rates because of the larger number of patients (i.e. internal medicine encompasses a lot of different sub-specialties).  While this is outside the scope of this blog, the key point here is that with PowerPivot, our healthcare customer is now quickly able to understand readmission rates of their patients.  With this information in hand, they can now perform further analysis to understand the root causes of the higher readmission rates and the possibility to reduce preventable reasons for readmission (e.g. incorrect prescription, adverse reactions, etc.)

Understanding re-admission analysis allows us to reduce the cases of preventable patient re-admissions.  This saves money, time, and improves patient health. As noted, in CMS' Stealth Health Reform, re-admissions are an indicator of quality failure and 75% of all re-admissions are preventable. And reimbursements for some of re-admissions may be modified or denied if deemed preventable.

… And we can now do this analysis with PowerPivot.

Why PowerPivot?

Because PowerPivot for Excel is an add-on to Excel, analysts were able to focus on understanding the data instead of focusing on learning the new technology.  As with most healthcare IT departments, there is a lot of data coming from a lot of different databases and vendor systems.  With PowerPivot, they were able to quickly import in data from the many disparate data sources and immediately start analyzing.  Once the analysis was completed, they can securely share this information within PowerPivot for SharePoint.

Discussion

I had enjoyed working with our healthcare customer on their PowerPivot project.  Because what we were doing here wasn’t just testing out PowerPivot’s features and creating analysis for the sake of analysis.  With PowerPivot, they were now able to perform readmission analysis - one they were not able to do before - in a matter of hours.  In a matter of hours, we could start helping patients stay healthy.

 

Guest blogger: John S. Parker – NetApp Microsoft Alliance Engineering Team

With Microsoft’s new release of SQL Server, there are a couple of things that I feel would be great to talk about.  The main topic that I want to discuss is SYSPREP. 

SYSPREP has been a great tool in the virtualized world for building golden copy images for your system.  The use of the golden copy helps to ensure standardization across the enterprise.  The release of SQL Server 2008R2 now supports building that golden copy for your SQL Servers.  Combine this ability to SYSPREP your SQL Server and you can build a bare metal build architecture that now contains your SQL Servers.  So we take this one step further and deploy this with Hyper-V and NetApp’s FlexClone Technology, now you can deploy hundreds of brand new SQL Server instances within minutes, no longer hours and days.  This ability to manage a golden copy and quickly deploy complete systems to include your golden SQL Server setup reduces the configuration and customization time for new database system. this reduction of configuration and customization will help you manage your entire SQL Server environment reducing configuration mistakes and delays.

NetApp participated in the TAP program testing the SYSPREP features with SQL Server 2008  R2.  As one of the testers I found it really simple to deploy an image of my golden setup with SYSPREP.  The process is simple, you run the setup program, select the Advanced feature and “Image preparation of a stand-alone SQL Server” option and the wizard takes you through the process for building your image.

The key things that I had to look out for was having enough disk space to hold the image and realizing that it was really just as simple as following the steps outlined in Books-Online.  Once you have your image then your set and your configuration ini file then you have everything you need to deploy your SQL environment. There is also the command prompt method where you enter all the configuration items but personally I like using a configuration ini file to ensure that each setup is like the rest.

The setup command looks like the following:

c:\sqlimage\setup.exe /ConfigurationFile=BellevueLabSQL.INI

This allows me to create a hands free setup and can be part of my bare metal provisioning process.  This method reduces the amount of time I spend creating and configuring systems in my lab.

So wrapping this up. I find that the SYSPREP tools with SQL Server 2008 R2 will help to make the deployment of new SQL Server instances fast, easy and with fewer configuration differences.  Then tying the entire provisioning process together now you can deploy your new systems in Hyper-V along with your SQL Server instance all in a single automated process.

Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President for the Business Platform Division, kicked off the start of Microsoft's Business Intelligence 2010 Conference today in New Orleans. During his keynote address, Ted discussed how Microsoft is listening to customers and working hard to help put better business intelligence in the hands of more decision makers at all levels in an organization. It’s this focus on users and making BI accessible to everyone through familiar, collaborative and managed solutions that differentiates Microsoft BI.

Microsoft hopes to make everyone a BI user and we are targeting the 500 million Office users and the more than 70% of organizations using SharePoint Server today. We endeavored from the earliest part of the product development cycle for SQL Server PowerPivot to bridge the gap between IT and end users by leveraging what is familiar – Excel and SharePoint.

To support end users with additional self-service search capabilities, the new Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector extends the search capabilities of FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to understand specific types of Business Intelligence documents – XLSX including PowerPivot models, and RDL from Reporting Services/Report Builder. The Business Intelligence Indexing Connector can be downloaded here:

Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector – Backend

Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector – Frontend

Ted was joined on stage with a familiar cast of presenters with him to showcase the newly released Business Intelligence offerings and to hint at future areas of innovation. The keynote will be available on demand at: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/Keynote02

Written by Ashvini Sharma, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft Corp.

SQL Server 2008 R2 empowers business users to create and share rich, compelling BI solutions through familiar tools such as Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010. While we’ve mentioned PowerPivot in the past, this post describes the overarching themes.

Self Service Business Intelligence

The goal of Business Intelligence is to empower users at all levels of an organization to make better, more relevant decisions. However, BI projects frequently require professional expertise, take significant time to deliver results, demand use of specialized tools, restrict how users work with their data, and can be prohibitively expensive. As such, there is a large gap between the benefits businesses derive from BI today and the potential impact it could have.

Self Service BI provides business users sophisticated BI capabilities by embracing how they work today: using common concepts and flexible approaches, in familiar tools, without large dependence on IT. PowerPivot for Excel 2010, for example, allows enables Excel power users to easily integrate data from multiple sources, interactively model, and analyze large amount of data from within Excel.

Besides enabling quick sharing of these solutions with others within the organization, PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 allows business users to schedule data refreshes so that up to date data is available without manual intervention, leveraging resources of the SharePoint farm. In addition, any client application that can communicate with Analysis Services can also consume PowerPivot data using PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010, enabling organizations to leverage their investments in Microsoft BI.

Managed Self Service Business Intelligence

Providing Self Service BI capability to business users is only half the story. With SQL Server 2008 R2, IT can actively empower a broader set of users to derive more value from their data, while reducing overall cost to the organization, and gaining more visibility into how data is used within the organization. SQL Server 2008 R2 provides:

• Easier infrastructure management

A dashboard integrated with the SharePoint Central Administration provides overview of hardware utilization and metrics such as query performance.

In addition, PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 automatically loads and unloads PowerPivot databases on the SharePoint farm, optimizing resource utilization based on activity without active IT intervention.

• Monitoring of data usage

PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 tracks user activity and provides several prebuilt views over this data. These include which user is accessing what data, what data sources are used by which workbooks, what are the top workbooks based on data volume, number of users or activity, etc. In addition, the usage tracking data is available for building custom reports as well.

IT organizations get unprecedented visibility into adoption of various applications and data sources, helping them optimize investment decisions based on real usage.

• Easier delivery of sanctioned data

With SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010, business users can use any SQL Server Reporting Services report or SharePoint List as a refreshable data source in their PowerPivot application. IT organizations can quickly disseminate data in a way that is readily consumable by business users, while automatically deriving usage monitoring.

As you can see, SQL Server 2008 R2 provides significant capabilities for managing a Self Service BI environment. Together, these services enable IT to provide tangible and substantial benefits to business groups within an organization while lowering overall costs.

To find out more about SQL Server 2008 R2 availability, see our previous post here.

Microsoft and PASS would like to invite you to an exclusive Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 event to come and discover powerful new capabilities that enable organizations to scale operations with confidence, boost productivity and deliver business insight that empowers end-users.  Learn how businesses like yours can use the new capabilities of SQL Server 2008 R2 to run the most demanding mission-critical applications, increase IT & developer efficiency, and deliver business insight where and when users need it.

· Tom Casey, General Manager of SQL Server development, will deliver the keynote in Santa Clara on May 25th, with many other breakout sessions designed to database administrators, IT pros, and IT decision makers.  Follow this link for more information and to register. https://www.regonline.com/R2CA

· Dave Campbell, Microsoft Technical Fellow responsible for driving technical strategy and architecture of Microsoft SQL Server,  will deliver the keynote in New York on May 27th with many other breakout sessions designed to database administrators, IT pros, and IT decision makers.  Follow this link for more information and to register. https://www.regonline.com/R2NY

There will also be representatives on hand to answer your questions from key launch partners such as HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, Unisys, EMC, NetApp, and SafeNet.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear these distinguished database experts in person.

There are only a few spot available to the first people to sign up, so don’t delay!

If you can’t make it in person, you can still learn a lot about SQL Server 2008 R2 by visiting the launch site at http://sqlserverlaunch.com

Microsoft and PASS would like to invite you to an exclusive Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 event to come and discover powerful new capabilities that enable organizations to scale operations with confidence, boost productivity and deliver business insight that empowers end-users.  Learn how businesses like yours can use the new capabilities of SQL Server 2008 R2 to run the most demanding mission-critical applications, increase IT & developer efficiency, and deliver business insight where and when users need it.

· Tom Casey, General Manager of SQL Server development, will deliver the keynote in Santa Clara on May 25th, with many other breakout sessions designed to database administrators, IT pros, and IT decision makers.  Follow this link for more information and to register. https://www.regonline.com/R2CA

· Dave Campbell, Microsoft Technical Fellow responsible for driving technical strategy and architecture of Microsoft SQL Server,  will deliver the keynote in New York on May 27th with many other breakout sessions designed to database administrators, IT pros, and IT decision makers.  Follow this link for more information and to register. https://www.regonline.com/R2NY

There will also be representatives on hand to answer your questions from key launch partners such as HP, Dell, Intel, AMD, Unisys, EMC, NetApp, and SafeNet.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear these distinguished database experts in person.

There are only a few spot available to the first people to sign up, so don’t delay!

If you can’t make it in person, you can still learn a lot about SQL Server 2008 R2 by visiting the launch site at http://sqlserverlaunch.com

While there are several exciting new features included in SQL Server 2008 R2 including  PowerPivot for Sharepoint and Excel, Master Data Services for data consistency and StreamInsight for processing high volumes of event stream data, what I am most excited about isn’t a core new feature but one of two new editions that are being introduced – SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW).

Parallel Data Warehouse is an appliance based solution using vendors including EMC to provide a highly scalable data warehouse. PDW uses a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that scales from terabytes to petabytes while delivering high performance and using SQL Server additional business intelligence features and functionality.

So what is a data warehouse and why does an appliance based solution make sense? For applications that are transactional in nature (OLTP), you can easily dedicate a set of disks to satisfy the small random access of data. If you run into performance problems you can devote more resources to the server to quickly address any issues. With Data Warehouse environments, there are large amounts of data that are being stored over a long period of time with analytic processing requirements. Having the capacity to store this data as well as having adequate performance for these requests is what makes this solution compelling.

But an additional gain to the appliance solution is the ability to provide parallel management of these large volumes of data. With parallel processing, data is stored on more than one device so that all of the resources in the appliance can access and process the data at the same time. If a server doesn’t have enough resources to process a request then multiple servers can be used together to process the load.

By including EMC’s industry recognized high performance and highly available arrays into the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse solution you have a dedicated appliance that has the power of Microsoft and EMC to handle some of the largest most complex data warehouse environments.

 

Technorati Tags: EMC,Partner,SQL Server 2008 R2,Parallel Data Warehouse,PDW

While there are several exciting new features included in SQL Server 2008 R2 including PowerPivot for Sharepoint and Excel, Master Data Services for data consistency and StreamInsight for processing high volumes of event stream data, what I am most excited about isn’t a core new feature but one of two new editions that are being introduced – SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW).

Parallel Data Warehouse is an appliance based solution using vendors including EMC to provide a highly scalable data warehouse. PDW uses a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that scales from terabytes to petabytes while delivering high performance and using SQL Server additional business intelligence features and functionality.

So what is a data warehouse and why does an appliance based solution make sense? For applications that are transactional in nature (OLTP), you can easily dedicate a set of disks to satisfy the small random access of data. If you run into performance problems you can devote more resources to the server to quickly address any issues. With Data Warehouse environments, there are large amounts of data that are being stored over a long period of time with analytic processing requirements. Having the capacity to store this data as well as having adequate performance for these requests is what makes this solution compelling.

But an additional gain to the appliance solution is the ability to provide parallel management of these large volumes of data. With parallel processing, data is stored on more than one device so that all of the resources in the appliance can access and process the data at the same time. If a server doesn’t have enough resources to process a request then multiple servers can be used together to process the load.

By including EMC’s industry recognized high performance and highly available arrays into the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse solution you have a dedicated appliance that has the power of Microsoft and EMC to handle some of the largest most complex data warehouse environments.

Technorati Tags: EMC,Partner,SQL Server 2008 R2,Parallel Data Warehouse,PDW

We’re happy to announce volume licensing downloads for SQL Server 2008 R2 are available today in all languages, including the public availability of the much anticipated PowerPivot functionality, delivering on the promise of managed self-service BI. Starting today customers can download the trial version of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and the web downloads of PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint. To get started please visit www.powerpivot.com.

“Until now, if business users wanted to take advantage of the large volumes of data their company collected, they had to ask their IT department to generate a report but with the managed self-service BI capabilities in SQL Server 2008 R2, they’ll be able to do such analyses themselves,” said Donald Farmer, principal program manager for SQL Server and one of the master minds behind PowerPivot. “That means they’ll be able to answer questions more quickly, experiment more, and test ‘what if’ scenarios. Organizations can become more agile. That’s exciting.”

The SQL Server team is excited to be participating in today’s Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 global launch event. You can hear more about Office, SharePoint and Microsoft’s BI solutions by attending the keynote by Steven Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division today at 8 a.m. PDT, Webcast live at www.the2010event.com. Additional upcoming virtual sessions include:

· BI PowerPivot Session - May 13th, 9 am-10 a.m. PDT

· SharePoint BI Session – May 14, 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. PDT

· Microsoft BI Session – May 19, 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. PDT

· TechTarget Live Chat on BI – May 20, 8 a.m. – 11 a.m. PDT

In addition to participation in today’s Office launch, the SQL Server 2008 R2 worldwide launch tour is well underway and boasts approximately 100 cities from Johannesburg, South Africa to Seoul, Korea, with more than 20,000 customers expected to attend one of the worldwide events. Events that have already taken place have been received with great enthusiasm including PASS Asia 2010, European PASS 2010, Portugal TechDays and UK TechDays. In Columbia, more than 800 developers and IT professionals gathered to hear Steve Ballmer give the closing address.

To find an upcoming event or to explore what’s new in SQL Server 2008 R2 please visit the SQL Server 2008 R2 Virtual Guided Tour at www.sqlserverlaunch.com. The Tour is now available in 11 different languages including French, German, Russian, LATAM Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. For more information please visit the SQL Server 2008 R2 Virtual Press Room here. 

Not your father’s fault tolerant server

Partner blog post from Peter Cook, Director of Global Alliances, Stratus

“The latest SQL Server technology delivers a robust infrastructure to support business-critical applications and to scale with growing business demands,” said Claude Lorenson, director of SQL Server marketing at Microsoft Corp. “For SQL Server users that also need the highest degree of hardware availability to complete their solution, the ftServer system from Stratus Technologies has a decade-long record of uptime performance that only a fault-tolerant server architecture can deliver.”

Wow! Why would Microsoft say this about a server vendor? It seems more and more business critical SQL based applications are being deployed on Stratus “fault tolerant” servers, a technology most people associate with some bygone age of computing dinosaurs. What’s going here? My name is Peter Cook, Director of Global Alliances from Stratus and I’d like to share with you what’s happening – and get your opinion.

First, SQL Server 2008 is the fastest growing DB and is being used in more and more tier 1 applications (we all know that…). Secondly, today’s Stratus ftServers run standard Windows  Server 2008 and are all based on industry standard cost effective Xeon Quad core technology. Over 10,000 are installed worldwide, most with SQL Server.

Finally, it seems as money does matter. Combined with SQL 2008R2, users can get better platform availability spend 50% less than other DB’s that rely on availability alternatives requiring multiple servers, hugely expensive software licenses and high cost support. Must be another mega yacht is on order or maybe a world cup to the moon contest?

SQL Server and Stratus – simple plug and play set up, 99.9999% availability, runs on SQL 2008 Enterprise or Standard Edition, thousands installed worldwide. Learn more here: http://partners.stratus.com/partnering-with-stratus/directory/microsoft and let me know what you think.

SQL Server 2008 R2 introduces several new features which significantly expand upon existing support for working in, managing, and leveraging a multi-instance SQL Server environment.  This blog post will focus on three of the new areas to improve your consolidation experience by using SQL Server 2008 R2.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

First, we have dramatically increased the number of logical processors we support.  Gone is the 64 processor limitation; SQL Server 2008 R2 can now scale with Windows Server 2008 R2 up to 256 logical processors!  This means you can run more workloads, more queries, and have more users accessing your SQL Server instances simply by moving to newer/larger hardware.

Second, Microsoft’s investment in application and multi-server management will help SQL Server administrators manage database environments more efficiently at scale.  A core concept to application and multi-server management is the addition of the Utility Control Point, which enables a centralized view of SQL Server instances and database applications and their utilization across the designated managed server group.  And for administrators who use System Center to monitor and manage their SQL Server instances, we are introducing a new SQL Management Pack which removes the DMO dependency, improves the health model (particularly around storage monitoring), and reduces noise and false alerts.

 

Last but not least, SQL Server 2008 R2 fully leverages the new Live Migration feature delivered as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V release.  This provides even greater benefits to virtualizing and running your SQL Server instance in a virtual machine by providing zero planned downtime.  You can also leverage System Center Virtual Machine Manager Performance and Resource Optimization to dynamically load balance your SQL Server workloads in a multi-machine/multi-instance environment.  A great video explaining this is more detail is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/tour/en/videos/business-continuity-windows-server-2008-r2-hyper-v-live-migration.aspx

Putting it all together, we ran a test simulating the consolidation of multiple applications onto a new 32 core server running Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2.  We used three of the most common consolidation methods: virtualization (one machine with multiple VM’s each with one SQL Server instance), instance (one machine with multiple SQL Server instances running natively), and database (one machine with one SQL Server instance and multiple independent databases).  As this chart shows, we were able to achieve consistent results across each consolidation method even up to 40 applications running simultaneously (and yes, this does mean 40 VM’s running simultaneously)!

Consolidation method

Number of applications

Throughput

Response time

Host system CPU utilization

Baseline (old hardware)

1

100%

100%

6%

 

Virtualization

24

+0.8%

80%

24%

Instance

24

+0.6%

58%

20%

Database

24

+0.9%

53%

16%

 

Virtualization

40

+0.6%

95%

45%

Instance

40

+1.1%

73%

37%

Database

40

+1.3%

55%

34%

For more details on this experiment including how we put it together and learn more about how to effectively consolidation your database workload and choose between different consolidation options, please refer to our newly published whitepaper: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee819082.aspx

 

Today we are happy to announce the availability of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 for MSDN and TechNet subscribers.

For subscribers, SQL Server 2008 R2 is now available in the following editions: Enterprise, Standard, Web, Workgroup and Developer (English Language availability only). To get started visit -

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions
• http://technet.microsoft.com/subscriptions

As a reminder, customers and partners who aren’t able to attend one of the many worldwide SQL Server 2008 R2 launch events, can view a SQL Server 2008 R2 Digital Tour at www.sqlserverlaunch.com.

Hi! I’m Roman and I been working on a really cool piece of technology in SQL Server 2008 R2. Maybe you have heard of it? It has generated a lot of buzz and interest during its CTP phase. It’s called StreamInsight, Microsoft’s platform for Complex Event Processing. Microsoft’s information platform vision provides enterprises with a “complete approach” to managing information assets, enabling all businesses to gain strategic value from information from the desktop to the datacenter to the cloud. And StreamInsight V1 is one essential piece in this spectrum. After more than a year of blood, sweat, tears, and insane amounts of coffee we are proud to release the first version of our Complex Event Processing Framework.

Those of you who have been following our Community Technology Previews (CTPs) throughout last year have already had the possibility to familiarize themselves with the product. Early feedback was not only incredibly positive, but also very constructive and strongly influenced the final feature set. Four notable increments over our last public CTP are:

• Count windows
• Non-occurrence detection (Anti-Join)
• Dynamic query composition at runtime
• Synchronize time across input streams

Additionally, many smaller issues and bugs were addressed. A few APIs slightly changed with respect to the November CTP, but porting your application to RTM should not require a lot of effort.

Here are the (English) bits - choosing the evaluation license during setup lets you already play with this version. Before you install, make sure to uninstall any previous CTP version:

StreamInsight X86
StreamInsight X64

Within a few days, we will update our product page and add download links and instructions there as well. The StreamInsight documentation is provided through a help file as part of the installation as well as through Books Online on MSDN. We also invite you to visit the StreamInsight Blog and the StreamInsight Forum, which is a great place to discuss questions and issues with the community and the development team.

Microsoft and AMD – Delivering Enhanced Value to SQL Server Customers 

Congratulations to Microsoft on the RTM of Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2! Matched with our new AMD Opteron™ 6000 Series platform we have a combination that delivers real value to the database market.

I remember a time when “value” meant “cheap” and that as a marketing person “value” was a word that you used with consumers and not with commercial customers. Then the latest economic crisis happened 2008 - 2009.

Suddenly, with the market plunging and significant business challenges all around, people started looking for value. They wanted more for their money – especially when saving budget dollars on hardware might mean that they were able to keep more heads on their staff to keep business critical applications running.

When we introduced the new AMD Opteron™ 6100 series processor (codenamed “Magny-Cours”), we brought a new level of value to the market. By making our 2P capable processors also capable of supporting 4P systems, we eliminated the “4P tax,” and everyone assumed that when we talked about value, we were speaking only to the 4P space. In fact, you might have read my blog detailing the concept of the value 4P. But in reality, the 2P market has plenty of new value being delivered as well.

A great example of this value is the new HP ProLiant DL385 G7, a 2U powerhouse that provides superior price/performance for On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) with Microsoft SQL Server. In fact, HP recently posted an industry leading TPC-E benchmark, which is commonly used to evaluate performance for OLTP environments:

• System: HP ProLiant DL385G7
• Throughput: 887.38
• Price/Performance: $296 USD per tpsE
• Total System Cost: $262,023USD (as tested)
• Database Software: Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition
• Operating System: Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition
• Server Processors: 2/AMD /AMD Opteron™ processor Model 6176 SE

These results highlight a significant value as the cost per tpsE for this configuration is currently the best in the industry. This result demonstrates the strength of the HP platform when combined with the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.

The key here is not the raw performance, but price/performance. Customers today aren’t always buying exclusively raw performance. Often the real decision vectors are price, power consumption and performance. And if you ask most customers (as I have) you find that price and power are often the key metrics with raw performance often being a very distant third.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is a great example of software that can easily use the 12 core capability and large memory footprint of the AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform. The latest version of Microsoft SQL Server offers a complete approach to managing, accessing and delivering information across the organization along with leveraging the advanced power management features of Windows Server 2008 R2.

AMD is working with Microsoft to change the value equation for databases. We are proud to be a platinum sponsor of the SQL Server 2008 R2 Digital tour – make sure you check it out for information about a launch event coming to a city near you.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.